Faith and Fear
Adler, Moshe
FAITH AND FEAR MOSHE ADLER Being an Orthodox Jew in an assimilatory world is something like trying to celebrate Shabbat in a house where it's Saturday. People bustling about, skirting your...
...Wouldn't they then buy into the whole system...
...Of course, I have the key...
...My Shabbat...
...With rare exceptions, modern Orthodoxy has refused to address these questions on their own terms, but has instead worked up an elaborate apologetic to assure itself that the questions are not questions...
...But the authoritarian spirit carries over from halachah into theology, so that, whereas the tradition offers varying doctrinal languages for articulating Jewish faith, modern Orthodoxy holds fast to one language and roundly rejects all others...
...We did it to preserve our vision of the whole, to keep alive our sense that "the awe of God is pure, abiding forever" (Psalms 19:10...
...We have reached the point where an Orthodox Jew who does not subscribe to the apologetic, who instead takes a fresh look into the system to find new answers, will have his Orthodox credentials seriously challenged...
...In some measure, our resistance to outside influence paid off...
...Isn't that like separating the statue from the marble—possible in philosophy but not in sculpture...
...Let us make no mistake...
...But you know the disciplined attention to detail that has gone into making Shabbat out of this day...
...Indeed, it might just be easier to move the whole Shabbat table into a private room and lock the door...
...If exponents of non-Orthodox movements have made "the need for change" their watchword, and in its name have abolished or watered down much of Jewish observance, then words like "change," "new," and even "interpret" become for a defensive Orthodoxy a vocabulary of heresy...
...Is it even meaningful to speak of separating Judaism from patriarchal-ism...
...It also closes off the possibility that Orthodoxy will ever deal honestly with the questions raised, questions which genuine seekers necessarily ask...
...In the pan-halachic universe, Jewish law is nothing more than a vast storage-andretrieval system, operating on the one unchanging program fed into it when it was first plugged in...
...Of course, some degree of trepidation is in order if one is not to make moral decisions in a cavalier manner...
...So you push the bustler away, back into Saturday...
...We are dealing with several substantive questions: Does Jewish law, purporting to be the norm-creating process of a divine Torah, really reflect the justice and compassion of God, or is it just and compassionate (merely) by definition...
...But to be motivated to look for the way, we need a powerful catalyst...
...It is not enough to generate from within Jewish law ingenious emergency responses to new situations...
...And they take away what they can, and continue their search for God's word in non-traditional systems...
...Attempts at innovation, particularly when they involve the appropriation of a rejected or untried doctrinal language, render one's Orthodox credentials suspect...
...The individual is viewed as inherently so vicious that, were he not reined in by God's law, he would sooner or later rape his neighbor's wife in the Temple on Yom Kippur that falls on Shabbat...
...There is simply too much personal responsibility in making such decisions...
...Orthodox Jews go on querying and jurists of Jewish law go on responding, as should be the case, yet two things most urgently needed are lacking: The first is an open climate of inquiry, in which all questions—even those whose answers have long been considered foregone—are addressed on their internal merits and not on their political overtones...
...Dealing honestly with the feminist questions means confronting our own fears and stereotypes and getting past them before we are entitled to invoke a single halachic category...
...People bustling about, skirting your Shabbat table, often resent your being in the way, sometimes tolerate you, maybe even distantly respect you...
...How far could we go in reinterpreting halachah before we'd find ourselves smack-up against some locked doors...
...We have shown the world that the Torah's NO is NO, because that is what we felt we had to do...
...The authoritarian mind fears the freedom to make moral decisions, especially where right and wrong choices are so sharply marked, the more so where the context is a law purporting to be divine...
...conscience is expediency...
...Some who sought clear direction in an age of religious and moral relativism have found it with us...
...If a spoonful of medicine is good for you, a bottleful is marvelous...
...Of course, we have the key...
...Indeed, the very effort of doing this would call forth our strongest faith, our finest religious sensibilities, our loftiest prayer...
...But when they look to us, keepers of His word, to show the way, all too often they find that long years of living inside the fortress walls have made our vision too narrow to encompass the whole, made our fear too mean to be called "the awe of God...
...Why anyone but a believer would want to style himself Orthodox in a world where it's so much more advantageous to be styled something else is never explained...
...Pan-halachism leads to dualism—everything is reducible to yes or no, good or bad...
...We are not dealing here with a pedagogic question: How can we make Yiddishkeit more attractive...
...This narrowed agadic perspective in turn reinforces the panhalachic, authoritarian climate of Jewish law, thereby rendering ever less likely the possibility of a more open climate...
...This dualistic approach leads in turn to authoritarianism...
...And how does one prove that an unconventional form of faith-affirmation is unacceptable...
...So bring on the restrictions: where the Torah or the sages left some openings, fill them in not with moral options but with prohibitions...
...Bright, devout seekers from without have found the living word of God in so much of the tradition that they desire to find it throughout...
...Hillel was saintly but Shammai was right, you tell yourself, and it's enough to be right...
...Moreover, the Jew who keeps Shabbat in a world where it's always Saturday knows only too well how fatally tempting it is to tolerate greater and greater ambiguity—and error—until one becomes a vochedike person, celebrating a Shabbat that is not Shabbat, losing touch, thereby, with the ground of Jewish being...
...Would we be willing to make those changes now that are possible under our present understanding of halachah, and would we be willing to back them up...
...But suppose that we were to draw up chairs for would-be tradition-borrowers, to offer to teach them not just a few bars but all the melodies, and then watch them discover that they have world enough, and time, after all...
...Yet, precisely because the halachic, agadic, and theological implications of these questions are so radical and far-reaching, our ability to deal with them adequately will be a measure of the truth of our claim that "the Torah of the Lord is perfect, renewing life" (Psalms 19:8...
...The very fact that it is unconventional is all the proof that is required...
...The situation is sometimes described as follows: A little old winemaker in Meah Shearim is the world's supreme arbiter of Jewish law...
...It's risky and takes lots of patience...
...Healthy reverence for our illustrious forebears, the prophets and sages, has become a dogma of regression: every generation further from Sinai is assumed to be roughly one more light-year away from moral worth and intellectual certitude, and our generation (whichever it may be) is the lowest yet...
...We must generate from within Jewish law the kinds of moral initiatives which would seize each new situation and liberate its inner spark of holiness...
...and multiplistic halachic models and doctrinal languages are tricks of Satan...
...And the second is the generation of multiplistic halachic models for responding to complex social questions...
...All authority resides in someone else, and that person is either dead or out of town...
...Some who sought certainty in an age of uncertainty have found it with us...
...Now," you sigh, "I can celebrate my Shabbat...
...If they want to share it, they know which door to knock on...
...In such a universe, na'aseh (we shall do, obey) is not, as we are taught, the prerequisite for nishma (we shall hear, understand) but rather its antithesis...
...What started out as a legitimate defense of the faith has become a circular rhetoric which convinces no one who does not already profess that faith...
...When authoritarianism becomes the dominant mood of Orthodox Judaism, everyone, including the leading jurists of Jewish law, feels compelled to move a step to the right...
...Rabbi Y, a leading left-wing jurist of Jewish law, would like to be a little more liberal, but he's afraid Rabbi X won't Like most such fables, this one is exaggerated, but not by much...
...I contend that we have such a catalyst in the questions raised by Jewish feminism...
...Perhaps our righteous ancestors (that is, anyone who lived at least one generation before us) could have exercised moral options, but we degenerates cannot...
...Rabbi X, a leading right-wing jurist of Jewish law, would like to be a little more liberal, but he's afraid the Haredim won't think he is religious enough...
...is itself but a glimpse into a higher world of eternal beauty and mystery...
...It leads to what the late Professor Heschel, of blessed memory, called pan-halachism: the notion that all Jewish religious questions are reducible to disinterested halachic questions...
...but they hardly ever understand you, and rarely if ever do they realize that the table is set not just for you...
...Indeed, you know that this day Moshe Adler, an Orthodox rabbi, is Hillel Director at the University of Minnesota...
...How unassailably secure one's fortress feels if, instead, questions about family planning, the use of heroic life-sustaining measures, or the limits of waging justified warfare can all be answered with the same dualistic "kosher or trefe" with which a "cooking spoon" question is answered...
...Will an observer of Jewish law acquire heightened spiritual awareness and reflect justice and compassion in the way he lives, or is Orthodox piety a form of scoring celestial brownie-points...
...How can you teach someone the whole Torah while he stands on one foot...
...For some we became a home in the universe, but for many we became instead a maintenance crew preserving the Biblical-Talmudic tradition alive within a fortress so that they might borrow elements of it to use on the outside...
...So you do...
...many have found only stagnation...
...Where does this Orwellian cycle lead...
...What could we do when we got there...
...When Shabbat became Saturday—when a secularized world decided to label the Biblical-Talmudic tradition "Orthodoxy" and lock it away with other medieval anachronisms—Jews who still revered that tradition as the living word of God accepted the label— and the locking away...
...There can be no room for multiple solution models like, "The range of halachically acceptable or desirable options in this particular situation is a, b, c, and d." Though such models are precisely the kind required by the complex social issues which characterize this age of unprecedentedly rapid social change, they are the kind offered least frequently by today's jurists of Jewish law...
...Such a stance not only closes off meaningful communication between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews...
...Subjective considerations, such as the halachist's personal outlook and experiences and the unique ways these shape his vision of the whole, cannot be permitted to enter the operation, for they would undermine the system's divine perfection—which is to say, its total objectivity...
...Is the way we understand halachic categories open to insight gained from new kinds of experience and new kinds of consciousness about the world, or did God give us a time-flawed system and command us not to notice the cracks...
...The halachist is a master key-punch operator who feeds raw data into the system, punches the right keys, and invariably gets the right answers—one and only one per question...
...When Jewish law becomes a storage-and-retrieval system and the halachist a master retriever, and when each question is susceptible of one and only one answer, people expect that the single admissible answer to each halachic question must invariably be dualistic: kosher or trefe, permitted or forbidden, mandated or exempt...
...The painful "chad gadya" I have been rehearsing here is my attempt to describe from within how Orthodox Judaism, in an effort to save the last Shabbat table left in a world of Saturday, has turned itself gradually into a garrison state...
...That is, of course, what our master, Hillel the Elder, would probably have done...
...And so the circle closes: fear of dangerous ideas leads to fear of dangerous words, which in turn leads to a refusal to acknowledge that the questions are questions, let alone that they may have exciting and enriching answers...
...If non-Orthodox Jews subject Jewish law to the arbitration of conscience (with non-observance being the frequent result) then "conscience" becomes for a defensive Orthodoxy synonymous with "doing whatever you want and calling it Judaism...
...FAITH AND FEAR MOSHE ADLER Being an Orthodox Jew in an assimilatory world is something like trying to celebrate Shabbat in a house where it's Saturday...
...Some, in fact, deem it a duty to ask a rebbe or a yeshiva dean to make all major personal decisions for them—from whether and whom to marry, to whether or not to go ahead with an operation, to how to feel about affirmative action...
...It isn't just a fear that men will lose their privileged status...
...many have found only smugness...
...The Haredim community of Meah Shearim and New York would like to be just a little more liberal, but they're afraid he won't think they are religious enough...
...The very suggestion that the questions are real, let alone in need of a new approach, has become for much of the Orthodox community a "Conservative" or "Reform" thing to do...
...But in larger measure it has worked against us...
...For we are, in this area, dealing with an interplay of unstated, perhaps unrealized, fears: those associated with ordinary feminism, as well as special fears like these: Since Jewish law and myth, starting with the Bible, are male-centered, won't the pursuit of these questions lead from doubt to heresy, from heresy to overthrow of the system...
...The surrender of one's personal moral autonomy becomes, for many, a fair price to pay for this feeling...
...For it is in choosing to keep God's law that we learn who God is—and it is in the exercising of conscience within the framework of God's law that we learn who we are...
...How, after all, can you represent the Shabbat by humming a few bars of its melody...
...Authoritarianism ultimately leads to (and is reinforced by) a basic distrust of the self...
...one's deepest moral and religious impulses are disguised lusts...
...Why is this so...
...Any who desire Torah know where to find it, we told each other...
...Can the very Torah, including the Bible, withstand the test of historical and critical analysis and emerge the stronger and the more enduring for it, or are we secretly afraid that if we examine it too closely, we will discover ourselves living inside a movie that ends with our discovery...
...It is hard to resist the compulsion: one doesn't wish to find oneself suddenly on the outside...
...Now it is time to show that the Torah's YES is YES...
...we can't all be saintly...
...If it is meaningful to speak of separating Judaism from patriarchal-ism, how would we go about doing it...
...Yet still we persist in equating our vision with the whole itself, and our fear of initiative with the awe of God...
...The proper thing to do, you would suppose, would be to sing the Shabbat songs with greater sweetness and devotion than ever, so that (if and) when one of the bustlers stops and asks you to hum him a few bars to carry away, you can draw up a chair for him, pour him some wine, teach him the melodies, and watch him discover that he has time to celebrate Shabbat after all...
...Rejoicing with the Lord is serious business, not some kind of "glorious cultural heritage...
...Orthodox Jews, it is maintained, all affirm their faith the same way, and have always done so...
...I am angry enough to want Orthodoxy to find its way out again, and confident enough in the self-regenerating power of God's Torah and in the decency of Orthodox Jewry to believe we can find that way...
...Our table would again become the source of light and music, bread and wine for a dark and troubled world—not just for those of us who already cherish its delights...
...It is also set for them...
...A person affirming Orthodox faith in an unconventional doctrinal language isn't really Orthodox, though he may style himself so...
...it's a dread that Judaism itself simply cannot become egalitarian and still remain Judaism...
...So they, the seekers, may grant that we have a key—but not the key...
...We can no longer innovate, we can but restate and refine...
...At present, Orthodox Judaism resists dealing with these questions, perhaps more than with any others...
...Sometimes, but not usually...
Vol. 3 • September 1978 • No. 9
